Thursday, April 07, 2005

Conservative Leaders Draw Line In Sand: Support DeLay ... Or Else

"Tom DeLay is the chosen leader of his party in the House. He needs to be held accountable, and so should House Republicans, who have to choose between DeLay and decency."

-- Ellen Miller, deputy director of the Campaign for America's Future

Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay."

3 Comments:

Hi,I'd like to share with you another side of this story. I can't say one way or the other about the "right's" attempt to control the media today [though I doubt it].

I have been a "hard right" guy all of my life. Like many conservatives, my politics came of age during the Reagan administration [he told us it was OK to be conservative].

I thought I was the ONLY conservative in the world. The Washington Post seemed to always paint my "type" as backward and neandrathal like. The big three networks never talked about people like me, or about things we cared about. CNN, the only cable news network at the time, had shows like "Equal Time" and "Both Sides," but these shows were neither. Even today, their Saturday show "Capital Gang" features two liberals, two conservatives and a moderator who is very much a Democrat. 3-2 is CNN's view of "fair and balanced"

It was from this black hole of information that the "right wing radio" blossomed in the early 1990s. Finally. A place for conservatives. Once that floodgate opened, and we were given a place to interact and react, things began to change. Three years after Rush Limbaugh, the Republicans regained the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. a coincidence? Then came Fox News. It was made fun of, and called a "mouthpiece" for the Republican party, but today, more viewers watch Fox than CNN and MSNBC combined. Coincidence? The Internet was the fait d'complete. Now, situations like the Dan Rather "Memogate" senario could not be ignored by the press. Were it not for the right wing media, Bush might have not been reelected over a lie.

Is there a right-wing bent in the media today? I don't know. I do know that for twenty years, however, conservaites had virtually no place to find news that they considered "fair and balanced." Life is a pendulum. It's likely it's just moved from your side to mine. Give it time. It'll come back.

I respect your viewpoints, and hope you respect mine. Because we differ doesn't mean either of us are wrong. Happy writing.Farid

No one is suggesting conservatives don't have a right to their opinions, or the right to see their opinions as part of a "fair and balanced" discussion on television, radio or print.

The problem, as David writes on the JABBS blog, is when conservative spin replaces factual information, sometimes under the guise of "additional facts." There's a fine line between spinning, distorting and lying. Mainstream media fails us when it subs one for the other.

I think the Gore item below really hits the target well. Conservative spin replaced the truth, to the point that articles a year later used the spin as fact. That's shameful, not just for the spinners, but for the lazy journalists accepting that spin as fact.

Look through JABBS' archives, and you'll find not just criticism of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage and Levin, but also of the news reporters at the NY Times, Washington Post and elsewhere, guilty of not knowing the facts -- or not feeling confident enough in the facts they know -- to avoid allowing conservative spin to dominate their writing.

JABBS also writes about conservative hypocrisy -- Bush, DeLay, etc. saying one thing and doing something else. I'm sure you can go to other blogs to find examples of liberal hypocrisy, but that's why there's a big blog universe, right?

You people are amazing. The liberal, left wing media has dominated policital discussions for years. Now that we conservatives are starting to speak up and share our opinions with others, you cry foul. Have you not heard of freedome of speech? Oh, that's right, most of you liberal, left wingers want a socialist state which would squelch such freedom. Well, all I can say is, MOVE!!!!!!!